OCEANSIDE WOMAN MARKS 104TH BIRTHDAY

When Anne Beversluis gets a visitor, she checks her hair and asks her daughter if she needs a bit more lipstick. The 104-year-old Oceanside resident is on the ball. She watches the evening news and keeps track of the Yankees score. Her favorite show is “Jeopardy”; the answers she doesn’t know, she’s got to find out right away.

Beversluis marked her 104th birthday last month and says she takes no medications.

Up until this year she was able to walk up and down the 14 stairs to get to her bedroom. But now that she’s not as mobile, friends come to her.

She moved to Oceanside from New Jersey in 1996 to live with her daughter Claire Abel and son-in-law Lyle Abel, after her husband of 60 years died.

Beversluis was born Oct. 18, 1909, in Paterson, N.J., to Hungarian immigrants.

She attended school through the eighth grade and hoped to go to high school, but at the behest of her father, worked with him at the Paterson Silk Mills as a “winder,” winding silk thread for men’s hat bands.

In her early 20s, she worked for a family, caring for their 5-year-old boy. She remembered his name and recently got in touch with him. He is now 85, and remembered her. They started reminiscing and exchanging photos.

One of her favorite Christmas activities is filling shoeboxes with small gifts for little girls across the globe as part of “Operation Christmas Child.” She has kept thank you notes from girls around the world.

Beversluis keeps upbeat. She listens to inspirational programs on TV and sings along with hymns. Her favorite is “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

She has three children, six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren and, yes, she knows about Facebook. But when she keeps in touch with her younger sister who is 92 and lives in Louisiana, it is by phone.